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ClickTale Review

Clicktale is a tool that lets you record website visitors and view videos revealing their behavior, including mouse pointer movements, clicks, scroll speed, navigational issues, keyboard stokes (filling out forms) and more. Clicktale is a killer app that every Internet marketer who is interested in conversion rate optimization should use. It’s like standing behind the shoulders of your website visitors and filming their screens with a digital camera, only Clicktale does it remotely, for pennies.

"ClickTale is a brand new approach to website analysis and optimization. While traditional web analytics provide aggregated visitor data across web pages, we provide information about individual visitor behavior inside the web page. We show website owners movies of browsing sessions, as well as meaningful reports of behavior inside their webpage by aggregating thousands of visitor sessions." – Clicktale

In summary, Clicktale records visitors with a simple JavaScript script snippet. The tool itself does not need much marketing, as its usefulness speaks for itself. You can literary see everything your visitors do, where they click, how they navigate and exactly how they engage your website.

http://www.clicktale.com/

Video Tracking

To record, you need to put JavaScript on each page you want recorded. JavaScript has to be present on each separate page.

As to search engine optimization issues, JavaScript is Google friendly and will not affect your rankings. I’ve tried it on our website for about two to three weeks and it did not affect our ranking in any negative manner.

You can set up recording intervals in the control panel to record 5 out 10 visitors, 9 out of 100 visitors, etc, or every visitor that comes to the website.

Once a visitor is recorded, Clicktale will also record all subsequent visits, showing the entire browsing history for a single customer. This is perfect for tracking user progression in the conversion funnel with each additional visit to the website, and also for observing behavior differences between first time search visitors, second time visitors, third time and multiple visitors.

With a premium subscription you can record visitor activity in secure SSL forms and shopping carts!

{mospagebreak title=Clicktale Control Panel Review}

As you log into the control panel you can check the number of recordings for a particular user, his country of origin, latest visit, first visit, active time on website, referred URL, entry page, landing page URL and more! If a user has more than one recording, you can view them in a chronological manner at different speeds. Clicktale will also automatically skip idle times (when the cursor is inactive).

More features:

It will show you keystrokes (as they appear on visitor’s screens, for example when users are filling out forms), including backspaces.

You can also see mouseclicks, including tracking of left, right and middle button clicks.

You can increase the video speed by 2X, 4X and 8X times. The default setting is 1X, which is the speed with which users browsed the website. You can also play around with the scale of the video window.

Usage

I could go on for hours listing all the useful applications of this tool. Usability testing, design testing, conversion optimization, spotting holes in the sales process, improving designs, copy improvement, headline modification, button tweaks… etc. I highly recommend you arm yourself with this tool as soon as you can, because this is the first time we have this level of insight into user behavior.

Additional Features

As if video recording is not enough, Clicktale has Web Form Analytics and Heatmaps.

Heatmaps help you visually understand how website visitors interact with the web pages. You can see where visitors look, what parts of the page they skip and how far down they scroll. It aggregates vertical scrolling behavior to produce three types of heatmaps: attention, visitors and total time. For each heatmap you can set the color opacity.

The attention heatmaps show how much attention visitors pay to a page area that is visible inside their browser window. The visitors heatmap shows a number of visitors and the fraction of them that reached a certain vertical location inside your web page. Most importantly, it shows you the number and fraction of visitors that reach the bottom of the page. Finally, the total time heatmap shows the total time of all visitors who were exposed to a specific page area.

Clicktale offers advanced filtering options, which you can use to sort visitors by actions, locations and more. Here’s a range of filters you will play with:

Dates – select dates or date ranges for recordings. Useful for comparing user activity after redesign, new copy or other site improvements.

Page Viewed – view recording by URL or page popularity.

Referrer URL – see how various referring URLs affect visitor behavior. Filter by Google, Yahoo, Live (and other search engine) or by banners/links/adverts. See the difference between search engine users and users who come through referral links or advertisements.

Visitor Activity – here you can find more granular measurements.

Tags

Click Count – filter videos by number of clicks, from 0 to 80. Useful for monitoring engaged users, who are more likely to deliver conversion.

Mouse Move Count – filter videos by number of mouse movements, from 0 to 400.

Scrolling Distance – see visitors who scroll a percentage of the page from 0% to 101%. This can be an indicator that the user is reading the page, but you have to add a minimum time limit to truly filter out readers, since the majority quickly scroll down to the bottom of the page, just to check what’s there before hitting the back button or clicking away.

Demographics – useful for tracking users who are a part of your targeted geographic area, for comparing visitors from different cities, and clearing out irrelevant traffic.

Countries – filter out irrelevant countries if you’re limited nationally. Compare user behavior from different parts of the world.

Languages – do French speakers browse differently from the English population?

Browser – I don’t think the browser affects user behavior, but I might be wrong.

Platform – Windows, Mac, Linux, Mobile.

Time Zone – does user behavior differ with timezones? Find out.

IP Address – more advanced, as you can filter out by cities.

Intervals – this section of filters has some really powerful features, like visitor active time, page count and more.

Visitor Active Time – track visitors who only spent X amount of time on your website. Perfect for filtering out "accidentals" and leaving only serious customer prospects. Keep in mind as much as half of the traffic is usually not interested in buying, while the other half is at different stages of the buying process.

Visitor Open Time – from my understanding this measurement only shows videos of visitors who keep the page open for X amount of time. Range is 0 to 90 seconds.

Visitor Page Count – sort videos by number of pages visitors view in a single visit. Useful for sorting out serious prospects, as conversion requires at least a few page views (lander > another page > checkout/application > thank you, etc). See where visitors stumble in the conversion process.

Page Active Time – this filter will show only visitors who spent X amount of time at a specific URL.

Page Open Time

Page Load Time

HTML Load Time

Dimensions – the last of the filters offered by Clicktale are:

Font Height

Width and Height Resolutions

Width and Height of the Web page

As with any quality tool, many features are overkill, but you can create extremely useful combinations, which is the next topic.

{mospagebreak title=Combining Filters}

The real power of Clicktale filters comes through combinations. You can combine any filters above to drill down to "accidental visitors," "more interested visitors" and visitors who are "considering," visitors who "converted" and visitors that abandoned your conversion process. For example, to observe videos of serious prospects who stand a high chance of becoming a customer, set the combination I describe below.